There's a Unicode cost to Korea's writing system: it needs 11,172 codepoints to represent. This is because there are 19 mandatory leading consonants, 21 mandato

There's a Unicode cost to Korea's writing system: it needs 11,172 codepoints to represent. This is because there are 19 mandatory leading consonants, 21 mandatory vowels, and 27 optional trailing consonants, giving a total of 19 x 21 x 28 possible syllable blocks, which are then generated by formula into range U+AC00 to U+D7A3 to comply with Unicode's policy that only the components of horizontal text be encoded, and any components built otherwise, e.g. Korean's square structure, be represented compositely.